BackupPC

Every now and again you find an Open Source tool that you can add to your short list of infrastructure management tools. These include tools such as nagios, rrdtool and web based interfaces such as cacti but up until now there was no killer disk based backup tools.

So for the past few years I have been using rdiff-backup and wrote my own rsync, hardlink pool, incremental backup system. Due to time constraints though I had never been able to develop this into everything I wanted it to be. But thanks to open source someone did have the time and developed BackupPC.

Though it has a bit of a daggy name it features:

• Single compress hash pool - one compressed copy of one file for many hosts
• Full and incremental backup capabilities
• Can handle unreliable hosts, goes looking for your laptop and if it finds it and you haven’t been backed up for a while it will run a backup - no interaction required.
• Email you if a host hasn’t been backed up for a while and there is also a nagios plugin
• Great web interface for configuration and host-based user rights to enable web based restores by downloading the file over the web or pushing it back to the host
• Perl based, but the code looks quite good and its separated into a number of tools in the backend. Runs as a daemon waking up every set time period to go looking for things to do.
• Supports rsync over ssh, rsyncd, smb for Windows hosts, tar, etc.
• Completely rock solid operation now on over 15 hosts with a quite staggeringly small amount of disk space required.

In recent times I have rarely added to my toolkit for server management, but this one is a keeper. My only suggestion would be to reposition their target audience, the tool works fantastic for servers as well as for standard PC’s and notebooks.

If you have some linux skills and are not 100% satisfied that your machines are backed up 100% of the time, give yourself some time to get up to speed with BackupPC it will be well worth it.